Page 20 of Tusks And Conditions

I grasp the doorknob. I twist. It doesn't move. I pull. Nothing. The external ward glyph pulses faintly through the wood, securing the perimeter against the outside, but the physical obstacle on the inside is stubbornly immovable. I slam both palms against the door and shout his name, but the hallway beyond is already silent.

He is gone. He has locked me in. And Korvan Blacktide is waiting at 1847 Greywater Lane.

I lean my forehead against the door. The wood is warm from the glyph. The Snarbo pads up behind me and presses its horrible, lumpy body against my ankles, all his eyes blinking up at me.

"I found that address," I whisper to no one. "I found it, and he locked me in."

The Snarbo whines.

I turn around. My laptop is on the kitchen island, half-closed, glowing faintly. And I am not the kind of person who sits and waits. I have never been the kind of person who sits and waits. I am the kind of person who tracks down every last cent of a missing fortune through seventeen layers of corporate fraud, and I am not going to stand here in my cardigan and my flats while the only person who has ever folded my laundry without being asked walks into a death trap alone.

I pluck up my phone. I open my contacts. And I start making calls.

CHAPTER 10

JAGGER

The warehouse at 1847 Greywater Lane squats at the end of a dead-end street like something the city tried to forget, all corrugated steel panels gone orange with rust and loading dock doors that haven't rolled open on legitimate business in a decade. Rain collects in the buckled asphalt of the parking lot, and the streetlights here gave up their purpose long ago, their casings shattered, their bulbs dark. I crouch behind a stack of rotting pallets across the street, cataloging entrances, exits, guard positions, the faint shimmer of a ward barrier stretched across the main loading bay. Two sentries by the front. One on the roof with what looks like a hexfire crossbow. At least four more inside, judging by the heat signatures bleeding through the thin walls where the insulation has crumbled away. Korvan Blacktide runs a lean operation. Lean and vicious, like a starved dog.

I've done this a hundred times. Two hundred. I've lost count of the warehouses, the back alleys, the underground fighting pits and smuggler dens and cursed vaults I've cracked open with my fists and my blade and the cold, efficient fury that has kept me alive since I was seventeen and running bounties for coin I used to buy my first pair of boots that didn't have holes in the soles. This is what I am. This is the thing I was built for, bred for, the violence coded into my muscles and my tusks and the war-runes etched into my skin before I was old enough to understand what they meant. My body knows the choreography of this. Slip the perimeter, neutralize the sentries, breach the door, clear the room. Thirty seconds if I'm efficient. A minute if I'm savoring it. I've done it in rain and in snow and in the blistering heat of the Scorchlands, and I have never once hesitated at this stage, crouched in the dark with my blade drawn and my targets illuminated.

But I'm hesitating now.

Because I keep thinking about the spreadsheet.

It was the one she'd opened on her laptop three hours ago when we were sitting at her kitchen island, the remains of pad thai in their little cardboard containers, and she was tracing Korvan's money through a network of shell corporations with the same focused, terrifying intensity I bring to tracking a target through rough terrain. Her brow furrowed. Her lower lip caught between her teeth. The soft click of her fingernails on the keyboard, a rhythm as steady and reliable as a heartbeat. She'd built a color-coded system for his financial crimes. Green for confirmed fraud. Yellow for suspected laundering. Red for direct ties to violent operations. The spreadsheet had more red cells than I've seen in most crime scene reports, and she navigated it with the calm precision of a surgeon, pulling threads I never would have found, connecting dots that had been invisible to every bounty hunter and DMI investigator who'd come before.

And then she'd looked up at me with those dark, sharp eyes and said, "His offshore accounts funnel through a Fae credit union in the Hollowbridge District. If we flag those transactions with the Supernatural Revenue Service, they can freeze his assets in seventy-two hours and he won't be able to pay his own bodyguards."

And I'd thought, with a clarity that hit me like a warhammer between the eyes, that this woman could dismantle Korvan Blacktide's entire empire from a kitchen island in a cardigan without a single drop of blood being spilled.

And then I'd locked her in the apartment and come here with a sword.

I close my eyes. The rain soaks through the shoulders of my leather jacket and runs down the back of my neck, collecting in the grooves of the runes along my spine, and the runes pulse warm against my skin the way they always do before a fight, hungry for it, eager, pulling the ancient battle-magic up through my blood like a tide responding to a moon I can't see. My body wants to move. Every fiber of muscle, every sinew, every scar wants to launch me across that parking lot and through those guards and into the belly of that warehouse where I can find Korvan Blacktide and end this with the simplicity that violence always promises but never quite delivers.

But Sabine dislikes unnecessary violence.

She said it three days ago, after I'd tackled the courier who delivered the black-marked envelope because I thought he might be an assassin. He wasn't. He was a nineteen-year-old kid with acne and a part-time delivery gig, and after I'd pinned him to the hallway floor with my knee on his torso. Sabine had pulled me off him by the back of my jacket with a strength that surprised us both and spoke, very quietly "Was that necessary?"

It wasn't. The kid had wet himself. I'd given him two hundred dollars and my sincere apology, which he accepted with the glassy-eyed shock of someone who has just had their entire skeleton rearranged by proximity to death. And that night, sitting on opposite ends of Sabine's cream-colored sofa with the Snarbo between us like a lumpy, seven-eyed chaperone, she'd looked at me over the rim of her chamomile tea and said, "You don't have to be dangerous thing in every room, Jagger. Sometimes you can just be... in the room."

Just be in the room. As if that's something I know how to do. As if I wasn't raised in a clan where your worth was measured by how many teeth you'd knocked out of other people's skulls by your fourteenth birthday. As if my body runes aren't literally designed to amplify aggression and dull pain and turn me into a weapon that walks and talks and occasionally reads fantasy novels in the bath.

I don't want to be here. The realization drops through me like a brick into still water, and the ripples it sends out touch everything. I don't want to be crouched behind rotting pallets in the rain with a blade in my hand and murder in my muscle memory. I want to be sitting at her kitchen island while she explains depreciation schedules in a voice so serious and earnest that it makes my heart feel like it's being squeezed by a fist made of sunlight. I want to watch her organize my receipts into labeled folders. I want to eat oatmeal. Plain, boring, wonderful oatmeal, the kind she makes with exactly one tablespoon of brown sugar and a precise scattering of blueberries arranged in a pattern that I'm almost certain is alphabetical by size, though I haven't had the courage to ask.

I want to go home. To her home. To the beige walls and the rules organized by color and the scent of her shampoo in the bathroom and the disapproving look she gives me when I leave my boots by the door without lining them up neatly against the baseboard.

I want to go home.

But Korvan Blacktide put a death warrant on me, and if I don't handle it, he'll send someone else. And the next someone might not come through a window when I'm standing in the kitchen ready to catch them. The next someone might come when Sabine is alone, walking to work in her padded shoes, her laptop bag over her shoulder, her mind on quarterly projections and amortization tables, completely unaware of the crosshairs settling between her shoulder blades because she had the catastrophic misfortune of being magically bound to me by a blood-ink clerical error on a Tuesday morning.

I open my eyes. I sheathe the sword.

And then I stand up, step out from behind the pallets, and walk straight across the parking lot toward the front door. No stealth. No flanking maneuver. No shadow-running or ward-cracking or any of the hundred calculated approaches I've spent my career perfecting. I just walk, boots splashing through puddles, rain running down my face, hands empty and visible at my sides, toward the two sentries who are already scrambling for their weapons with the panicked coordination of people who did not expect a six-and-a-half-foot Orc to simply stroll up to them in the open like he's arriving for a dinner reservation.

The first one is a Goblin, compact and wiry, fumbling with a shock-staff that's too big for his hands. The second is human, broad-shouldered, carrying an enchanted baton that crackles with blue lightning along its length. They position themselves in front of the loading bay door, shoulder to shoulder, and the Goblin bares his teeth at me in what I assume is meant to be threatening but reads more as orthodontically ambitious.

"Ironjaw. You shouldn't be here."